Arghiri Emmanuel > Quotes

“You understand, even if the Americans are right, I am against them”
― Arghiri Emmanuel

“Bill Warren is right. The mere arrival of foreign capital in a country does not ‘block’ anything. It enslaves or develops the country just as much as any other capital, neither more nor less. Consequently, if it should happen that capital from New York were to flow into Calcutta as it flows into San Francisco, we should have no reason to suppose that Calcutta would not one day be, for better or worse, the equal of San Francisco. Unfortunately—and this is where Bill Warren’s mistake begins—(a) capital has never flowed into Calcutta; (b) under present conditions it seems improbable, if not impossible, that it will flow into Calcutta in the future; indeed (c) Calcutta is not underdeveloped because it has been invaded by foreign capital but, on the contrary, because it has been starved of this capital.”
― Arghiri Emmanuel

“I believe this quasi-religious attitude explains the repeated misunderstandings and deficiencies of revolutionary Marxism in the face of all the major events that have accompanied decolonization—such as the secessions of Katanga and Rhodesia, the Biafra war, and even the Algerian war and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Marxists seem to circle round and round these problems without knowing from which angle to tackle them. Innumerable ‘mini-theories’ are produced that contradict one another; words are refuted by other words; and no current doctrine of imperialism is accepted by more than a small group, even within the great ‘left-wing’ parties themselves on those occasions when reflection is encouraged, allowed or simply tolerated. This confusion becomes unbearable when the inadequacy of the old concepts is recognized and people try to save them with a multitude of deductive developments instead of firmly replacing them by new ones.”
― Arghiri Emmanuel

“Like every living organism, the capitalist system reacts to "shocks" by creating ad hoc antibodies. This does not signify that it is immortal: no living organism is that. But it does show the mistake made by some analysts who take the agents of a survival which is real for the ferments of a death which is not.”
― Arghiri Emmanuel

“If, by some miracle, a socialist and fraternal system, regardless of its type or model, were introduced tomorrow morning the world over, and if it wanted to integrate, to homogenize mankind by equalizing living standards, then to do this it would not only have to expropriate the capitalists of the entire world, but also dispossess large sections of the working class of the industrialized countries, of the amount of surplus value these sections appropriate today. It seems this is reason enough for these working classes not to desire this ‘socialist and fraternal’ system and to express their opposition by either openly integrating into the existing system, as in the United States of America or the Federal Republic of Germany, or by advocating national paths to socialism, as in France or Italy.”
― Arghiri Emmanuel

“(Paradoja) es la etiqueta bajo la cual la ciencia económica coloca con interés, diversión y cortesía distante, todas las cosas que son demasiado sólidas para ser pura o simplemente rechazadas y demasiado contradictorias para ser adoptadas.”
― Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange